“What you do today, Joey?”
I shook my head as I chewed and swallowed, and then finally answered Pop, “Not much.”
“Me too.”
Yeah, sure: just busting his hump with that hot dog cart.
I thought of Jane:
“Be good to your father. He loves you so much.”
How could she know such a thing? Were her mom and dad friends with the Pagliarellos? Or was it just a pretty easy guess?
“Something wrong, Joey?”
“What do you mean, Pop?”
“You face. You thinking hard about something.”
I stabbed at the potato with my fork.
“No, nothing, Pop. Really. Just regular.”
“Could be this girl who buys spaghetti for you, Joey?”
“Ah, come on, Pop! I’m okay! I mean, really! I’m fine!”
Pop kept studying me, chewing on the stem of his briar pipe. He wasn’t buying it and I knew it. I was thinking about scads of things: Jane Bent and Mr. Am and the Asp and Baloqui, plus this sense of unreality that would drop over me at times like a Faraday cage reconfigured to block out time, and now and then I would feel, however distantly and through a veil all too freaking darkly, that events were repeating themselves! Not just moments, but in blocks of months—even years! It wasn’t déjà vu, it was déjà everything! At times I even knew what was coming next! Very rarely. But like now. The radio. The Hit Parade. A new “bonus song” about the Lone Ranger:
Gimme those reins, there’s pep in my veins.
Onward westward ho! Hi-yo Silver, Hi-yo!
I knew the words before I heard them!
“Come on, you thinking very hard, Joey. Tell me what about.”
I said, “Homework, Pop.”
What should I have said? I see the future? There are lies that don’t exactly rend the fabric of the universe.
Pop got up and cleared his plate, then came back to the table with a bottle of Schlitz, his favorite beer. He liked its faintly salty taste. I kept eating and he kept on studying me thoughtfully. Meantime, the Hit Parade was still going and now after “Hi-Yo Silver, Hi-Yo” came “The Three Little Fishies”:
Boop boop dittum dattum wattum, choo
Boop boop dittum dattum wattum, choo
Pop turned a blank look to the radio.
Number 3 on the Hit Parade.
I heard a rumble of thunder and then a burst of heavy rain sloshing down against the window panes so loud that you couldn’t hear the song, an event that I’m certain St. Thomas Aquinas would have cited as a “Sixth Way” of proving God’s existence. I started to brood about maybe this was some kind of warning that we ought to start thinking about building an ark in case the “Hut Sut Song” ended up at Number 1:
Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah
And a brawla brawla sooit
I said, “Pop, do you pray?”
He was hoisting the Schlitz to his lips when he stopped and looked across the little table at me. “Do I pray? What kind question, Joey? Yes. Yes, I pray. Not with words. With my heart. Be always good to people, Joey. That is prayer.” Looking aside, I just nodded and said quietly, “Right.” Pop was big and very strong and there’d been times when he’d prayed with his fists, but I didn’t think it was such a hot idea just then to mention it or how he once broke a would-be mugger’s arm and then another time the nose of some high school football hero talking trash to a little old lady on account of she’d told him to shut his mouth when he’d called out to a girl in the rumble seat of a car that was stopped at a traffic light, “Hey, you wanna screw?” If I’d asked him what maiming had to do with kindness, I knew he’d just tell me that of all his humanitarian acts these two were possibly the kindest of all inasmuch as, “From now on they be good, Joey. Right?” He took a swig of the beer and then looked me in the eye. “Something wrong, Joey. Tell me. Tell your father.” Which is when my unconscious mind must have decided to run to the front of the bus, grab the driver by the shoulders and shake him awake.
“Be good to your father, Joey.”
The setup couldn’t have been better.
I put on a hangdog face and looked aside.
“Ah, it’s nothin’, Pop. Really.”
“No, is something, Joey. Tell.”
I shook my head and murmured, “No, Pop. No. It’s so selfish.”
“I not care. It’s alright, Joey. Tell. I give you anything.”
“Pop, you’ve given me enough, so just forget it. Okay?”
“No, not okay. I want to know. Now I worry.”
I looked up into his big chestnut eyes. He was scared.
“Oh, no, Pop! I don’t want you to worry!”
“Then must tell me, Joey! Tell!”
“You won’t get mad?”
“No-no-no, Joey! No!”
“Ah, geez! I just hate myself for asking!”
“Asking what, for God’s sake?”
“I need a favor, Pop.”
“A favor? Dot’s all?”
“It’s something big and that’s all I’m going to say.”
Pop buried his face into arms that he’d folded on top of the table and, utterly exasperated, said nothing. A sigh got lost in the wool of his sweater.
“Sheesh, Pop, if it means all that much to you!”
“I waiting,” came the muffled and hopeless murmur.
“I want to sleep in the living room. There. I’ve said it.”
For a couple of seconds Pop didn’t stir, but then he looked up, his wide brow furrowed with incomprehension as he suddenly exploded, “What?”
“See? I knew you’d get mad, Pop! I knew it!”
“No, not mad! Only not understanding, Joey! Why?”
I said, “The fights.”
And then I launched into a story that would have made even the most hardened white tiles in our bathroom, which had seen about everything, weep as I spoke of the loneliness of the long-distance bedroom sleeper, and how I’d be scared by “funny noises,” like these creaks and little spooky tap-tap-taps in the ceiling, and most times I couldn’t sleep on account of I’d be thinking so hard about the Health Club fights I was missing, not to mention having windows that didn’t look out to darkness but out to the street and familiar sounds: cars passing, punches and curses—anything but tap-tap-tap! All a steaming heap of cow-flop, of course, but there was no other way to give Pop what he needed and deserved: a real bed with a downy mattress.
“Do not cry, Joey. Please.”
I rubbed a knuckle at the corner of my eye.
“I won’t.”
“Couch not comfortable, Joey.”
“Not for me, Pop. I’m smaller,” I told him.
Well, he studied me for quite a little while until he turned toward the faint sound of jukebox music as someone either entered or left the Health Club. Then he turned back to me and said, “Okay.”
“Oh, thanks, Pop! Thanks! Oh, wow!”
I did everything but slobber and kiss Pop’s hand.
He still seemed to be thoughtfully appraising me.
“You go out tonight, Joey?”
I said, “No, Pop. Too much rain. I’ll do homework.”
Sister Joseph had assigned us to write fifteen hundred words on the topic “Why St. Francis of Assisi Talked to Birds but Not Fish.”
“Try to make it original,” she’d said.
Pipe stem in his teeth, Pop nodded and said, “Good boy.”
I went back to my dinner feeling happy as Larry. Pop got up with his beer and walked over to a window where he stood and looked out at a fall of rain so heavy it seemed almost on the verge of violence. “Tonight they fight inside,” he said quietly. “Too bad.” Then he turned to me and smiled mysteriously and in a flash I saw the painting and the caption:
Peruvian Male Mona Lisa with Beer
These were mists I couldn’t penetrate.
Ever.
Later that night while still doing my homework—I had narrowed the saint’s disinterest in fish, by
now, to a single species: carp—Pop came out of the bedroom in his pajamas, gave me a hug and then went back inside and closed the door. A second later he opened it a crack and said, “Joey?”
“Yeah, Pop?”
“There is woman at school she really having green hair?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Then is true?”
“Yeah, it’s true. Pop, who told you about that?”
He said, “Tony. Tony Pagliarello. What her name, Joey?”
“Doyle, Pop. Her name is Miss Doyle.”
“I want to meet her.”
What was this?
I said, “Why?”
He wasn’t looking at me now, he was staring just over my shoulder with this faraway look in his eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe sadness? Fond remembrance? Both?
He said softly, “Tony say to me she crazy.”
Then he mutely turned away and closed the door.
I slept on the living room sofa that night and it wasn’t that bad except I dreamed I was deep in the Amazon jungle desperately searching for something important even though I had no clue as to what it might be or what these Hari Krishna bozos were doing there cavorting and dancing in a circle all around me while they’re shaking and slapping at their tambourines while chanting over and over again, “What a schmuck!”
Never mind. I slept deeply and oh so well.
I woke up to church bells ringing. Not St. Stephen’s, though. Farther off. I sat up and scratched at my chest through my red-and-white striped pajamas while I looked out the window and could see that it was still coming down in buckets. Big stretch. Big yawn. No sound from the bedroom. Pop must have still been asleep and dreaming that he’d died and gone to heaven. I got up and was padding toward the kitchen for some juice when I happened to look down through a window to the street across the way and saw a woman in a fisherman’s yellow raincoat and hat standing holding an umbrella. She was staring up at the window and when I stopped and stared back she started happily and excitedly smiling and waving to me. Then my heart jumped a little because she sort of resembled Jane, I thought. But then I saw she was older, in fact a lot older. She quit waving and blew me a kiss.
“Joey?”
I turned my head. Pop had cracked open the bedroom door. He was looking kind of down. Almost cranky.
“Yeah, Pop?”
He shook his head, looking even more troubled.
“I am sorry, Joey, very, very sorry, but I cannot sleep in bedroom. I cannot. I do not know what is cause. Maybe noises like you say. I do not know, Joey. Habit, maybe. Something. I have to sleep again on couch. That’s alright? Maybe now you should be always leaving bedroom door open. When they fighting very loud you still be able to hear. It’s okay, Joey? Sorry. Very sorry.”
“Yeah, that’s fine, Pop. No problem.”
“I know.”
So what was that?
I watched him peering out at me as he slowly closed the bedroom door, and then I turned to look down at the woman below on the street. But she was gone. Vanished. Not in evidence. I even opened the window and leaned out into the rain, looking this way and that, but there wasn’t any trace of her. Drenched, I shut the window and went on into the kitchen where I poured myself a glass of orange juice and then stood with my back to the icebox, sipping and thinking about the woman blowing me a kiss. There were lots of crazy people in Gotham. Two days before there was a girl walking past me on Second Avenue shouting “Government!” over and over at the top of her voice and not sounding all that terribly pleased. My mind went to Pop and the sleeping arrangements, and, Oh, well, I tried, I thought. I tried. At least that was something. But then as I was lifting the juice to my mouth again, all of a sudden I stopped as I remembered something: Was that a sly smile that I’d seen on Pop’s face when I was watching him close the bedroom door? Now I heard the grinding of a faucet handle being turned and then water running hard in a bathroom sink, and looking off I smiled faintly and nodded as, “Oh, yeah,” I softly murmured. “Oh, yeah.”
Peruvians. Who among them could you possibly trust?
8
I guess the title of a movie about the next day would be The Lady Vanishes. Most Sundays after twelve o’clock Mass I’d tote grocery bags for tips at the market, but the stupid heavy rain and fierce wind never stopped, as if some Hollywood studio had arranged it to coincide with the release of The Hurricane, a South Seas Jon Hall starrer, so I sat around at home with a three-inch paper scissor cutting out a Barney Google mask from the Journal-American Sunday funnies, thus setting up the reason that at the end of my life my tombstone should be totally blank but for the single word in tall block letters, DUPE! for I’d followed the paper’s instructions that by “thoroughy mixing” flour and water I would wind up with glue. The lying fucks! I also entered a couple of their fraudulent puzzle contests. “Neatness counts!” they always said. Yeah, sure. Well, I gave the right answers to all of the questions in all of the puzzles all of the time, and as for neatness my answers were in perfect block letters, I’d even dust them for flyspecks, for crimminey sakes! But do you think I ever won? Not once! I tried everything, even setting down my answers on paper that I’d cut into the different geometric shapes of the most popular and bestselling bars of soap, and at the end, in humiliating desperation, a bleeding, humongous heart on the back of which I wrote in neat letters, IT FLOATS. Yes. Memories are made of this.
Monday morning Jane wasn’t in school. Bummer. I had so many things to ask her. Come lunchtime I tried to console myself, trudging despondently to Lexington Avenue and 27th where the publishers of Superman comics were ensconced and I wound up talking to some girl in reception and doing my ever so insouciantly charming and engagingly innocent altar boy act while underneath I was seething and basically asking where in freak was the Superman badge I’d written in for, a demand I finished off with hooded lids and a barely audible, “Neatness counts.” The girl gave me a pretty odd look at that but then must have decided that she hadn’t really heard it since not only did she give me the badge but a Superman Club decoder ring as well!
Some Mondays don’t have to be all that bad.
But by Friday things were rotten: still no Jane.
“Hey, you seen Jane Bent anywhere?”
The eighth-grader in the school yard, a truck-sized brute named Leo Zalewski, put down the ruler whose end he had placed against a loose upper molar. He’d been about to bang it hard with the butt of his fist, this being our version of “affordable dentistry.” Leo’s eyes were always moist but now as he looked down at me they seemed on the verge of drowning. “Joey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
“What for?”
“I was about to bash out the wrong tooth.”
“Geez, I’m glad I just happened along.”
“Some coincidence, huh?”
I said, “Yeah.”
I’d decided not to mention the Holy Ghost.
“So whaddya want?” he asked me.
“Have you seen Jane Bent?” I repeated.
“Seen who?”
“Jane Bent.”
“Who’s she?”
“Who’s she?”
My response not having advanced the state of either his knowledge or undoubted deep interest in who should be favored in the Joe Louis–Billy Conn heavyweight boxing match that night, Zalewski looked bored and turned away. “Gotta find myself a mirror,” he mumbled. He’d started walking toward a door to the school and the basement boy’s room that was constantly redolent of urine and chalk, turning briefly to wave and stare at me wetly as he uttered, “I’ll never forget you, pal.”
I went and collared another eighth-grader that I knew, Billy Burns. “Hey, what’s up?” he said, unwrapping a penny Hooten bar.
“Listen, Burnsy, have you heard why Jane Bent’s not in school? What’s the story? Is she sick? What’s goin’ on?”
“Jane who?”
“Jane Bent.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Whaddya mean?” I said. “Jane! Jane Bent! She’s in your class!”
“Since when?”
“Are you nuts?”
“Are you?”
It could be that I was. I went on to ask other eighth-graders, but every one of them told the same story. I mean, talk about Gaslight! I’d seen her in the school yard! She’d been here! This was some kind of crazy mistake, I was thinking, like these guys must have misheard her name. And then the bell rang out in the school yard and we all trooped back to our classrooms, me being the only one walking like a zombie. Before the second bell for the start of class, Sister Louise was preoccupied with searching for something in this big black satchel of hers on her desk and I could pretty well guess what it was. Different nuns had different variations on torture. Sister Marguerite’s, for example, was mental and perhaps the most fiendish of all. We would scribble away, writing compositions, which after you had finished it you’d take to her desk and hand it to her and then stand there watching her read it, and when she’d finished she wouldn’t look at you, she’d just turn away with this quiet moan like she was getting warmed up to spend a couple of weeks in the Garden of Gethsemane as she placed your paper atop the stack on her desk and then quietly said to you, her expression inscrutable, “Thank you. You may go back to your seat,” and then you’d hear this pained sigh from behind you. But then sometimes, when one of the brighter kids handed in a paper, she would dredge up a tight little weary smile and say with her thick Irish brogue, “Ah, well, now maybe here’s something sure to brush away the cobwebs from my heart,” and she’d read it and then slowly turn away with that same dead, unreadable expression as she wordlessly placed your composition on top of the others, after which she’d prop her elbows on her desk, lower her face into her hands and then slowly shake her head. Equally effective, though far less inhumane, was the special weapon that Sister Louise was now groping to find in her bag, her dreaded nail-studded “Guidance Ruler,” and seizing the chance while she was distracted, I grabbed hold of Paulie Farragher and asked him in urgent whispers to confirm that he’d actually seen and met Jane.